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The next morning and Gemma woke up with a hangover.

Sal sat at the breakfast table beside her and couldn’t stop smiling.

Gemma had on her bathrobe and shades. She couldn’t take any light at all.

And Sal was enjoying every minute of it.

Lucky and Marie were enjoying it too. It wasn’t every day that their always-dignified mother was hungover.

“I thought you were going to church this beautiful Sunday morning,” said Sal teasingly. “Weren’t you preaching to the rest of us about how you wanted all of us to go too?”

Lucky laughed.

“Ma, you alright?” Marie asked.

“I’m not thinking about your father,” said Gemma. “I’m ignoring the mess out of him.”

Sal laughed too. “I tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t I go in that kitchen and whip you up some soggy eggs and put some gravy in them and cut up some onions and peppers and some liver shouldn’t hurt. Don’t you just love liver, Gemma?”

Gemma almost threw up at the breakfast table. She jumped up and hurried to the bathroom. All of them laughed.

“You wrong for that, Daddy,” Marie said.

“Ma gonna get you when she gets out of her hang,” said Lucky.

But then Sal’s cellphone, seated on the table, beeped.

He picked it up, entered his password, and looked at the message.

But as he was reading it, his baby girl Teresa, called Tee-Tee, began crying in her nursery.

Since the Nanny was off on Sundays, and they knew that Gemma was indisposed, Marie was about to get up to go check on her.

But Sal stopped her. “I’ll go,” he said as he sat his phone down and made his way to the nursery. “I haven’t seen my baby all morning.”

“Can you believe Ma got drunk?” Marie said with a smile as Lucky picked up their father’s phone. Then she frowned. “What are you doing?”

“You didn’t see that look on his face when he read that text?”

“What look?”

“I don’t know how to describe it,” Lucky said as he pressed in his father’s password, “but it looked like he was real concerned.”

“It’s probably work-related, Lucky. Put that down.”

But Lucky didn’t do any such thing.

“Daddy’s going to knock you into next week if he finds out you even know his password, let alone that you’re reading his texts.”

But Lucky was already reading the text. Then he looked at Marie. “What?” Marie asked him.

He handed the phone to her. The text read: Looking forward to our lunch my love . And then it was signed B . Marie looked at Lucky.

“Don’t look work-related to me,” he said.

“Who’s B?” she asked.

“How should I know?”

Then they heard their father talking baby talk with their baby sister and Marie quickly handed the phone back to Lucky. Lucky quickly pressed it back to black and sat it back on the table.

When Sal walked back into the breakfast room holding his baby girl in his arms, he was none the wiser. But his children couldn’t stop staring at him. And especially at their poor mother, when Gemma returned to the breakfast table too.

They’d heard so many rumors from even their friends about how their father was stepping out on their mother, but they always defended him. They always called their own friends liars and traitors for believing that nonsense. They’d lost a few good friends because of those nasty rumors.

But for the first time they weren’t so sure about any of it. That was why they couldn’t stop staring at their parents. Did their mother know and was tolerating it? Or was she completely in the dark too?

They didn’t know. But it was unsettling.

Because my love , those two words that stood out most to them in that one sentence text, screamed female to them.

Because my love just wasn’t two words they’d ever heard anybody say to their father.

Because my love denoted ownership and love.

Something only their mother should be able to proclaim.

But it wasn’t their mother who wrote that text.